The present invention relates to integrated circuits, including Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) silicon chips, and methods and systems for routing signals and voltages to and from the silicon chip, including systems and methods for configuring and/or constructing routing pathways to and from silicon chips.
With recent advancement of information technology and wide use of the Internet to store and process information, more and more demands are placed on the acquisition, processing, storage, and dissemination of information by information handling systems, e.g., computing systems. Information handling systems are being developed to increase the speed at which they are able to execute increasingly complex applications for business, personal use, and entertainment. Overall system performance is affected by each of the key elements of the information handling system, including the performance/structure of the integrated circuits or chips, processors, any memory devices or caches, input/output (I/O) subsystems, efficiency of the memory control functions, any associated memory interface elements, and the type and structure of the circuit interconnect interfaces.
The constantly increasing speed of information handling systems which execute increasingly complex applications places more rigorous performance demands on the multitude of integrated circuits or chips forming the circuitry in such systems. One manner to handle the increasing demands on such systems and circuitry has been the development of integrated circuits, and in particular Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) silicon chip modules or packages. As VLSI increases silicon chip performance, the number of connections to the VLSI chip has increased such that a significant amount of routing resources are used to provide various signal connections to the VLSI chip as well as to provide power to the VLSI chip. Newer VSLI integrated circuits and chips are limited by routing resources (routing of signals and power), and the time and expenses of configuring the routing and numerous interconnections.
Computing demands require the ability to access an increasing number of higher density devices at faster and faster access speeds. Extensive research and development efforts are invested by the industry to create improved and or innovative solutions to maximize overall chip performance by improving the design, structure, and/or the methods by which integrated circuits, including VLSI chips, and/or modules are made and operate. To manufacture sufficiently small structures in integrated circuits, chips, and/or modules, self-aligned double patterning (SADP) technology was developed. As device scaling continues to facilitate increases in the number of devices, e.g., transistors, per unit area on the silicon chip, the requirements for routing signals and power need to be addressed.